Friday, July 11, 2008

Over the last few months, I've taught Ryan how to pronounce "th" properly. He's generally been a clear-speaking kid, correcting his speech as time moved along, but the "th" thing didn't seem to be self-correcting. So one day, we had a little lesson and he pretty much got it. So did Morgan.

Our issue now is the fact that he is randomly replacing "th" for "f" with amusing results. It occurs to me just now that he's doing this in part because he isn't hearing the difference, which might account for his lack of self-correction. So now I am spending more time than ever explaining speech, due to remarks such as:

Are we going on Fursday or Thriday?

I have 8 thingers and 2 fumbs.

I fought that Obi-Wan thought the Bad Guys.

Hey! I fink I thigured it out!

Are there free or thour crackers in the box?

That pesky English language. I imagine this will work itself out eventually, but if you have any foughts, uh, thoughts on the matter, please drop me a line!

3 comments:

We've had the letter switching at our house, except it was d and b. Our neurodevelopmentalist called it an issue of auditory processing and set us up with several months of a program call FastForward. This pretty much corrected it, at high expense and a high level of boredom for my 7 year old. A friend of mine used Earobics, got the same results for much less $$ and her son found the program to be more enjoyable.

Proper auditory processing is also supposed to make instruction following, cooperation, reading and writing easier. Also, it never hurts to see how kids are doing at locating sound - have him close his eyes, you make a sound and have him point at it. For example, get out a salt shaker or baby rattle, shake it to his left, to his right, over his head, behind him, down by his knees and see how he does. Well-organized brains should be able to identify 90% of the locations.

I do have to say it is nice to have the proper speech going now, but I find I'm a little sad to see the last of the cute baby-isms go.

When Ben and Shira were younger, I kept on correcting them when they pronounced "t's" as "d's". (as an aside, for years I thought Sean Hanitty was a Hanidy because of the way he and other pronounced his name. My South African ears like to hear t's where T's should be.)

Pretty soon, Ben and Shira were replacing many "d's" with "t's". So "middle" to "mittle". Nothing we said or did could convince them to say the word correctly. We had to wait until they started reading and then they believed us.

My speech peculiarity as an English speaking British colonial is that I struggle to say my "r's". I don't even bother introducing myself to little kids by my real name, Sherene, I just use my nickname, Shez. they all think I am saying, Shewene.

For a while Ben could not pronounce the "tr" sound. It came out as an "f". He provided hours of amusement because he was very deeply in love with his toy dump truck and insisted on telling us that he love it, very much.